“No.”
Eventually, she asked me to download the soundtrack so that she could act out the movie on her own, without the pictures to guide her. All I had to do was say no, but again I didn’t. I still liked the cheap sugar rush you get from buying your kids stupid crap. I downloaded the soundtrack, and over the next few weeks, the girl would have me play it front to back and watch as she acted out every scene. I got to be the Huntsman and pretend I was gonna stab the shit out of her multiple times, which I found inappropriately cathartic. My daughter also took special care with the scene where Snow White bites into the apple, dies, and rests in a glass coffin. The girl was all about resting in that glass coffin. One day, while we were playing in the basement, she explained the blocking needed to perform her Snow White routine.
“I’m going to die,” she told me.
“Okay,” I said.
“And then you’re going to come and kiss me on the lips.”
“Yeah, no, that isn’t gonna happen.”
“And then we can get married!”
“HOLY CHRIST, NO.”
She grew serious for a moment. “Dad, am I gonna die?”
“Like, you personally? In real life?”
“Yeah.”
“Not anytime soon.”
“Are you gonna die?”
“Me? Not anytime soon.”
“But when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when I’m eighty? Hopefully, we’ll all be cyborgs by then.”
“What’s a cyborg?”
“The point is . . . you don’t need to worry about dying anytime soon. That’s the fun of being your age.”
“Okay. Well, I’m going to die now.”
“Okay.”
She lay down on the couch as the chorale for Snow White’s funeral pageant began playing. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, pursing her lips just a touch.
At a certain point, you learn to get over yourself as a parent. Diapers are gross, but you get over it. You go to bed at 9:00 P.M. every night because you’re lame, but you get over it. And sometimes, your child will innocently want you to kiss her on the mouth, clearly not thinking of such an act the same way you do. You get over it.
The girl looked very pretty in her official Disney Snow White dress, lying pretend dead on the couch. The dress had poofy blue shoulders and cheap gold trim along the sleeves, with a sparkly red top and a silken sheath of yellow polyester for a skirt. The Christmas prior, my mom had bought her a pair of blue Snow White shoes, with blue heels that blinked with every step and a little heart-shaped picture of Snow White adorning the toes. She had her eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest now, and for a moment, I thought about what it would feel like if she really were dead, if that were really her corpse resting on the sofa, with a choir chanting, “To be happy forever.” She was so beautiful and perfect lying there, the thought of it was unbearable. I wanted her to wake up, to live again.
I leaned in and gave her the tiniest of pecks. The girl’s big fat brown eyes popped open and she smiled as if she really had been brought back from the grave. I led her out into the center of the room and spun her around as the finale played. In my head, I was fast-forwarding two and a half decades to her wedding day, seeing her resplendent in a white gown and leading her out onto the parquet floor of some random hotel ballroom, with her new husband—a strapping young lad who needed to kiss my ass for YEARS before finally winning my grudging approval—looking on. I could nearly touch the moment.
A few months later, I was about to take the girl to Miss Rhonda’s class and she resisted.
“I don’t wanna go,” she said.
“You don’t?” I asked. “Don’t you like ballet?”
“No. It’s boring.”
“What about princesses?”
“Princesses are for little kids.”
“Well, what do you like?”
“Alicia!” She pronounced it “Ah-LEE-cee-ah” in a fabulous Spanish accent.
“Who’s Alicia?”
“FROM GO, DIEGO, GO!”
“Seriously? That show is awful.”
“I wanna be Alicia for Halloween!”